Forgettable travel moments you’ll always remember
 

Not the moment you stepped on to the North Pole. Or met the Pope. Travel memories that should have faded away but haven’t.

Mine is cycling across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in NYC. I thought I would be paralyzed with fear. But our lanes were closed to traffic. The pavement was brand new. The weather was perfect. And the view ...

Hearing Sweet Caroline at Fenway Park was pretty neat too. Any come to mine?

Windows in St. Chappelle in
​​Paris and the Bernini's in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Roma.

Our first ever family European vacation. Kids were about 13/14 years old. We started in Paris and then to Munich, where my mother in law, husband's cousin and his Uncle met us. The Uncle was from Austria and he drove us from Munich through Austria and gave us a tour. I had grand ideas of what this trip would be and I had to let it go. Honestly, we spent more time in the small town in Austria where my mother in law grew up and hardly anyone spoke English. My kids favorite part of our travels, that small town. They loved going from house to house and there were parties every night at someone's house celebrating us, the American cousins. All the kids played soccer outside and none of them spoke English. There is nothing in this town, no stores, no restaurants, no air conditioning, and in late June/early July and we slept with the windows open. All the glamour of Paris, the quaintness of Munich and the beauty of Vienna, etc... my kids loved our stay in that small town in Austria.It was the highlight of their trip. And to be honest, it was the highlight of the trip for us also.

nice memory girlonthe go

One that stands out for me was on our first visit to Madrid - we were staying in a large, upscale hotel in the city center and when the elevator opened up, there were four matadors all decked out getting ready to go to the stadium for the bullfight. Unfortunately did not get a picture.

Sweet Caroline is part of one of my forgettable moments that I will never forget too - lol. We were on a shuttle bus in Bali, driving 3 hours back to the airport. It was a huge bus (by Bali standards) and there were only a couple other passengers on it with us. In Bali, the main driving rule seems to be that the biggest vehicle has the right of way, and to claim the right of way, you just have to honk and everybody else moves. So it was a crazy ride - lots of honking, lots of overtaking other vehicles and then squishing back into traffic on our side of the road to give way to oncoming trucks - which were pretty much the only vehicles bigger than our bus. The driver had 1 mixed tape in his stereo that played over and over again. Sweet Caroline was on that mixed tape, so every time I hear that song, I think of that bus ride.

Forgettable, as opposed to unforgettable:

Driving on a narrow 2 lane road in Slovakia in the Tatra mountains up a slope, bumper-to-bumper traffic, idiot woman with kids in car behind decides to pass our car. She pulls out; I move the car a foot to the left to dissuade her; she moves onto the left shoulder to continue her pass. I see oncoming cars; she continues. When she's abreast of our car, she starts sliding to her right, forcing me onto the right shoulder. She continues moving right, sideswipes our car. I jam on brakes to avoid rolling down the mountainside to our right. She continues onward, having completed her pass.

I start honking, and both us gesture thru the windshield to her to pull over. Three miles (six minutes) later, she pulls off at an exit, and we follow her to a parking lot. She (about 40 yrs old) feigns ignorance of English, so my spouse lapses into Deutsch, insisting she call police. After two minutes of harangue, she does. They come in about twenty minutes, separate us, get stories, take Breathalyzer tests (this is 11:00 AM). During the wait for them, I drew up the world's greatest-ever accident diagram, complete with little tiny NO-PASSING signs.

I complimented my Slovak policeman on his English, to which he replied he had spent a year in Pittsburgh as a police intern. We got the number of the police report and address to write to get a copy, and departed.

She got a ticket and fine on the spot, something like equivalent of $500. We got a credit card bill for $5,000 damage, which was reversed a month after we gave the CC company the details of accident report. So she got hit with the whole $5,500, all to save a few seconds. The one nice thing, the 5,000 miles we got for the charge on the card were not reversed when the charges were. But the whole thing is still vivid in our memories.

We went to Italy a couple years ago, and our last night was in Venice. We had an early morning flight so had a cheap hotel by the airport. We decided to stay in town until 10 or 11 pm and then catch a bus to our hotel. We ended up sitting in the Campo Santa Margherita Square. There was a group of about 20 children and dad's playing soccer, and there were groups of University students celebrating graduations, all wearing laurel crowns. A group of students stopped by the outdoor bar where we were sitting and engaged in an enthusiastic and very off-key rendition of Oasis' Wonderwall. It was so much fun.

Jaiselmer, India.
I was walking down the stairway of my cheap, one-star hotel in the upper section of this desert citadel. The time was 5 am so I was tryna tiptoe and keep quiet, so as not to wake fellow guests. I had a rendezvous with my driver down by the citadel's front entry, a 20 min. walk, and we were going to move on to the next town. For some reason, the hotel's night watchman suddenly turned the hall light on, then abruptly 'off'. As a result, I went tumbling head over heels down the stairs. Luckily, I was OK, but the marquetry table at the bottom of the stairs was totaled after I'd collided with it. I made a face with the watchman as though to say, "WTF is wrong with you?!" but he just stared at me, with no reaction.
I made the rendezvous on time but could've done without the drama.

I am done. The idiot watchman.

Watching Ireland play rugby in the World Cup last October in a pub on the Aran Islands. I know nothing about rugby, but I was cheering and hugging people as if I did. Just wasting some time before catching the ferry and my friend and I wandered into this pub. One of those travel moments that was a highlight of the trip.

Sincere question - Why didn't you let her pass? Why move the car in her direction?

I have the same question. We routinely drive two lane mountain pass roads and two lane river roads that get busy in the summer. Dumbass people start trying to pass two or three cars at once and it's dangerous. We tend to slow down so they can get around and not cause on accident. Yeah, they're a-holes, but I don't understand the impulse to make a dangerous situation even more dangerous.

(We have to drive six hours of busy, two lane highways over the 4th of July weekend, and I'm dreading the trip on Friday and the trip home on Sunday...campers, boats, road construction, too many cars trying to pass illegally.)

I’m sure I have had such moments, I just can’t remember any.

Same.
Especially with kids in the car.
Especially on vacation.
Just let her pass. Avoid the drama. Avoid the time wasted. Avoid complications. Letting her pass costs you nothing in time, energy, drama and you get on with your vacation with no lost time, energy, drama and/or expenses.

my first move to the left was when she began to pull to the left to edge into oncoming traffic
the oncoming traffic was only about 300' away
at 30 mph that's only about 5 seconds from a head-on crash
she was only maybe 10' behind me, and i was maybe 10' behind the car in front
not enough room to put a 20 foot car

my second move to the left was to get off the 2' wide right shoulder, which was next to a 45 degree downslope

understand now? Lesser of two evils.

The kids were in her car

"Avoid the drama"

DRAMA?
IMAGINE THE DRAMA OF LETTING HER FORCE ME DOWN THE MOUNTAINSIDE
IMAGINE THE DRAMA OF A 15 CAR PILEUP ON A NARROW MOUNTAIN ROAD
IMAGINE THE DRAMA OF A HEAD-ON CRASH, CAUSING 30 REAR-END COLLISIONS ON THE SAME MOUNTAIN ROAD.

I left out the part about when she pulled out, she forced an oncoming car onto the right shoulder of HIS lane.
Obviously I never saw the result of that. But perhaps THAT driver reported the incident to the police also, which perhaps is why the police gave her such immediate justice/punishment.

We were on a Rhine river cruise with about 8 other couples from my husband's company. The day's itinerary was a stop in Speyer, then a bus would take cruise participants to Heidelberg for the day. We enjoyed touring Speyer and had a wonderful lunch at an outdoor cafe. When my husband went to pay, he realized he did not have his wallet. (He had been taking his phone in and out of the same pocket for various reasons.)

We retraced our steps and headed back to the boat, where the buses for Heidelberg also would be and checked in at the boat. The buses left and we had about half an hour before the boat, too, would leave to meet the bus tour further up river. We headed back into town, this time to the police station, where, fortunately, we reclaimed the wallet.

Got back to the boat in time and were practically only passengers left on the boat. We enjoyed drinks, shuffleboard and just a leisurely couple of hours, feeling grateful to some honest person in Speyer.

I won’t forget this thread.